42 . . , alOln' i :::::. :.<:= j ,* i : : ::" . '\J. '. . ;:-;.:{}? /:: ;: :::r If ßl V eM DELECTA AFTER-DINNER e !! Ij !.<- ,; .:l' WJ Its flavor suggests all the qualities you have liked bes.t in liqueurs-tang, delicate bouquet, rich body, silken smoothness.. Its 249-year-old name, de Kuyper, is your best guide to quality. ..... DE I(UYPE 1' , ÐE1;E() f r-'-'Øøø/l ø " \ f!ttW i . , .....:;4 ..,.....2oi.J1'O,1& ..' !National Distillers Products Corp., New York . 86 Proof ::::::::(: : : l .')r'"' "i:',i ,", ,'.I! : ;:::' , " i 1 : iJJ?w;;: : , , \ V' E.ST. ;"'06 PROVIDENCE. R. J. THE. ART GALLE.RIE.S -$I Pltotograplti11g tlte Tif'ar .. U NTIL now, for reasons I won't try to go into and which aren't completely clear anyway, we have had very few good exhibitions of paintings about the war, and as a re- sult we who stay at home and cannot know what war looks like have been forced to fall back on newsreel and newspaper photographs for our documentation. These have been, for the most part, extra- ordinarily vivid and illuminat- ing, but they have certain lim- itations, the trouble with the first being that the scenes flash past so fast that the spectator has little time to digest them, and with the other that he never sees enough at one time to get a consecutive impression. In the end, the artists, or quite pos- sibly only one artist (perhaps one good artist would be enough), will produce the definitive statement about the war. What has been needed meanwhile is a photographic show that will correlate all the random impressions we have been getting from the newsreels and news- '-' ......' papers and make them organic and con- tinuous. The Modern lVluseum tried once a couple of years ago, in its "Road to Victory" exhibition, and failed- failed, I think, if one were to look deep- ly enough into the matter, because the road to victory was rather obscure at the moment and the show was forced to resort to a good deal of dramatic '-' tricking-up in the way of arrangement to get any effect at all. Now the wlu- seum has tried again, with an exhibition called "Power in the Pacific" and ar- ranged, like the first, by Captain Ed- ward B. Steichen, and this time it has succeeded. In fact, the show gives about as clear and complete an idea of what the war is like in the Navy as woul4 be possible to get without being in it. Even if you have seen "The Fighting Lady," the Navy documentary that is going the rounds just now, this show is an important one. In the first place, it doesn't conflict with the film. It paral- lels it, but only in part, for whereas the film concerns itself entirely with events aboard a carrier, the exhibition covers a whole task force in action and conse- quently has a diversity of interest. And though the film has the priceless value of movement, the show has two other values that are equally in1portant-the value of non-movement, simple, studi- able stillness, and the valuè of nearness, or size. You will see shots-of a Grull1- man Hellcat taking off from the flight deck of a carrier, of an oncoming J ap- anese plane beIng peppered with flak and Inachine-gun fire, of the uprush of flame and smoke following a bomb hit '-' -which on the screen would have been mere blurs of motion but which here are caught and fixed permanently, for you to look at as long as you want to. You will see others big picture of the battleship Pennsylvania, lying maybe five hundred feet below you and looking as broad as an is- land, just after all her four three-gun turrets have let go, and the more detailed view of five Navy torpedo planes in eche- lon, the nearest of them closer than any non-pilot is likely ever to see one-so near, indeed, that you can make out the little scuffed spots on a wing where the mechanics stepped when they were working on it. A good many of the pictures are in- tensely dramatic, but there is a minimum of histrionics about them. The plan of the show is simple. Beginning with d " b k d ". a ozen or so ac rgroun pIctures (the men, the sea, the fleet), it takes YOLl more or less step by step through the whole course of a combined naval attack and landing operation, from the time the first dive-bombers leave the carriers, through the bombing, the shell- ing, the landings, to the return of the planes and the disposal of the dead and wounded. It is not all simple fanfare and blood and th under, by any 111eans; there are some grim pictures, particularly in the last section, and quite rightly so, too, for n1en die in these operations, and others who went out whole in the Inorn- ing- come back wounded. '-' Because of this, the fact that there is real blood mixed in with the wave shimmer, the cloud pilings, and the dra- matics of gun flashes reflected on steel, it would be trivial to say that one "liked" this photograph better than that, even such truly beautiful pictures, esthetical- lv, as the one numbered 34, of the deck of the Lexington, or the one of a J ap plane's wing tip floating in one corner of what otherwise is a photograph of, a calm, sunlit stretch of sea. Anyway, the principal emotion one has, as always with photographic exhibitions, 1S of won- der that the cameraman happened to be there-to catch the look of mixed haste and anguished concern in the face of the ...... medical corpSll1en in "Battle Casual-